Ekmel Ertan's personal website
Ekmel Ertan's personal website
MATTER LABOUR AESTHETICS series, which deals with the processes of production and consumption and the transformation of material as a result, consists of two separate exhibitions. FIRE and THINGS present the artistic research and productions of Buşra Tunç and Pınar Akkurt, respectively, in a conceptual connection in two different spaces.
FiRE (Buşra Tunç) is concerned with the wastes and wastes that arise during the production process, while focusing on the transformation processes that materials undergo, investigating the aesthetics of 'error', the unthought-of possibilities of the material and the losses that come with it. THINGS (Pınar Akkurt) deals with ready-to-consume products that successfully complete the mass production process and are released to the market. Akkurt, on the one hand, purifies objects from their functions, on the other hand, by giving them new forms, she explores new possibilities of material, perception, and signification.
Akkurt's works, which are presented to the audience in different periods and contexts, can be read as parts of research on the object, function, production, and consumption processes. Akkurt makes visible what is invisible in the process of transformation of raw material into ready-made objects with her designs that detach objects from their given contexts and pave the way for new thoughts and questions about mass production, labor, function, and aesthetics.
The everyday objects, which are metamorphosed by gaining unexpected forms through repetitions and new patterns, also refer to the "consumer society". While the artist re-objectifies the ready-made objects, which are the products of cheap labor in the mass production process, with the artist's labor-re-making-, he assigns them new -but this time- conceptual functions. Taking "remaking" as a problematic, Akkurt in a sense "hacks" our expectations and habits, inverting our ready knowledge of matter, labor and aesthetics.
Pınar Akkurt is an artist and designer focusing on upcycling. She experiments with easy-to-reach everyday objects and soon-to-be-waste materials. She endeavors to design sustainable systems at different scales and to create new visual languages. An important part of her life is making and experimenting, Akkurt is also the founder of the Upcycling Library, a platform for researching and archiving simple examples.
